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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As the world remembers Pope Francis, there's always the question of who and what comes next. These questions for the church are very much related to the culture war and political questions in the rest of society. For example, an op-ed in the New York Post by Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review, said, "Francis was meant to be a pope for the age of globalization. The political consensus on both sides of the Atlantic favored free trade and high levels of immigration. The question was only how high. The entire planet would soon be a single community and all that remained to do was reconcile the United States and Europe with the Global South. That called for reminding wealthy Americans and Europeans of their duties to the world's poor."

It continues, "With same-sex marriage triumphant, the Catholic Church seemed to be on the losing side of the West's culture war, its future dependent on negotiating the best possible terms of surrender." Then later, it concludes, "But if Francis was the pope for a globalist era, what the Catholic Church needs now is a populist pope, one who understands that if the church renews its ties to the working class within the West, not just in the Global South, it will find ready converts."

Some excerpts from that op-ed in the New York Post. Obviously, people on the other side of the culture wars and with different views on what Jesus would want differ from that. We'll get the analysis and views now. We'll open up the phones with Daniel Rober, chair of the Catholic Studies Department at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. One of his recent articles in the Catholic-oriented Commonweal magazine is about the transition to an unknown future after Francis. Dr. Rober, thank you for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Dr. Daniel Rober: Thank you for having me. It's great to be on.

Brian Lehrer: First, on the legacy of Francis himself before we talk about the future, you wrote an article that began with you on Good Friday showing your kids the movie version of Godspell with its backdrop of early 1970s New York City. Why did you start your remembrance of Pope Francis with that?

Dr. Rober: Sure. Well, I did that in part because it got to two themes about Francis that I wanted to emphasize in that article. One of which was his love of film. Francis, I was reading his recent autobiography, which is really a jaunty read. It got some criticism from some Francis experts, people who like Francis that prefer its editing, but it actually I found very conversational. He talks a lot about movies he liked to watch.

Some of them were a little surprising, talking about works of Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, some of the great international directors of the 1950s, '60s, '70s. Then the other element of Francis that I really wanted to emphasize, which I think is really relevant here in New York, and I was honored and glad that I was following Janno Lieber on this show because I actually wrote a piece for Commonweal on congestion pricing last year and I'm interested in transit issues too, is Francis's urbanism.

He's somebody who really liked city life, especially in Buenos Aires. There are pictures of him riding the subway as a cardinal archbishop, which I don't think, frankly, you see Cardinal Dolan doing around here too much. He's somebody who was very comfortable in the city. Even you might have seen some of his last words. I think the last known words we have of Francis were after he had a stroke.

He knew he was probably about to slip into a coma and die. He said to his nurse, "Thank you for bringing me to the Square," which was last week. He was brought out onto St. Peter's Square, clearly in a reduced state of health, but he wanted to be out there in the Square with the people. He's somebody who wanted to be in the city with the people, not locked up behind the walls of the Vatican.

Brian Lehrer: Just one more thing on Pope Francis and film since you wrote about that. People will probably not have heard about that very much elsewhere. You wrote that he struck up a rapport with Martin Scorsese. You remind us that Scorsese, among many things that he did, of course, made the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, which was controversial at the time. You write about that. How do you think the film should be viewed or how Pope Francis viewed it? Why'd you make that name-check?

Dr. Rober: Sure. Well, I brought up Francis's relationship to Scorsese. If you're talking about remembrances of Pope Francis I actually linked in that piece, Scorsese wrote a piece in Vanity Fair already as a remembrance of Francis. This was clearly something, a relationship that mattered a lot to Scorsese. I think for him, being in his 80s, being on the back-end of his own life, I think it's helping him find a reconciliation with his Catholic faith, which has been tortured.

That specific film, The Last Temptation of Christ, is a really interesting film. I focused especially on the scene where Jesus, played by Willem Dafoe, is on the cross and is experiencing the temptation to get off the cross and to go live the life of a husband and father, which, of course, there's nothing wrong with, but to go live a normal life instead of sacrificing Himself on the cross to save humanity. He ends up getting confronted.

You follow through and He gets confronted by St. Paul saying basically, "Hey, we needed you to get on the cross." He goes back. It's a dream sequence. He ends up back on the cross doing what He's supposed to do. I think that message really got a lot at what Pope Francis was trying to get at in terms of the mission of the Church, that the mission of the Church is not to be comfortable to rest on its laurels but to be out there with the people and to be out there with those who are suffering, with those who are on the margins of society, those who are left behind by society.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, some of you know, we did a call-in Monday for your tributes to Pope Francis today. We'll invite you in on what kind of crossroads do you see the Church at now as we look to the future and what direction would you like to see it go? You heard some of those lines from the op-ed in the New York Post on a conservative track. You're hearing our guest, Daniel Rober, who's chair of the Catholic Studies Department at Sacred Heart University. What would you like to see or what questions do you have? 212-433-WNYC, from any point of view, 212-433-9692. Call or text. Starting to look toward the future, but a little bit through the eyes of Pope Francis. Still, you describe him as having had a distaste for traditionalism. What aspects of traditionalism most of all?

Dr. Rober: Sure. I should be clear that when I'm referring to traditionalism, I'm referring first and foremost to a movement, which is a pretty small set of people. Many of whom reject the reforms in the Church from the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Most famously, they prefer the older form of the liturgy of worship, which is not just about the Latin language, it's usually characterized that way, but also about various, different other kind of ritual aspects and prayers that changed at that time, but also did not like the openness to the world to interreligious dialogue and other aspects of the modern world that the Church was trying to grapple with at that time.

Again, the way I saw it is Francis sees the Church as in motion, both in the present and through history, is needing to respond to the signs of the times, not staying still, not resting on its laurels and consolidating its teaching but being willing to engage with where people are now and not feeling threatened by engaging and having those conversations.

Brian Lehrer: The op-ed in the Post notes, as I think others have too, that there's a bit of a surge recently in young people joining the Catholic Church or, in some cases, coming back to it. Something more grounded in tradition then everything in our transient and morally relativistic world is what many of them are looking for. Do you see that maybe even in who's attending Sacred Heart or disagree with that interpretation of what's drawing some young people in if you think that's actually happening?

Dr. Rober: Sure, I do think that is definitely an element of why people convert to Catholicism, right? They're looking for something that is grounded in a deep tradition or something that can give them an orientation. What I'll say is that conversion is a process. If you convert to Catholicism and you really embrace it as a faith and not just as an ideology, not just as a system of thinking but as something that you allow to work on you and to transform you, it may take you places you're not expecting, right?

We'll hear pretty soon in the liturgy that Catholics will hear the proclamation of Jesus to St. Peter after His resurrection that somebody will take you and lead you where you do not want to go, which was a prediction of the crucifixion of St. Peter, which is how he died, being crucified upside down in Rome. That's something that happens to anyone who converts that sometimes you convert for one reason, but where that ends up taking you if your heart and mind are open might be quite different than what you might have expected.

Yes, I do think that is why people are coming in a lot of cases. I do think and I have some confidence that if they allow themselves to-- and even if they might have been hostile to Pope Francis and his message that they may find themselves opening to the kinds of things he was getting at because they're really rooted in the gospel. What's deeper in the tradition of Catholicism than the gospels, than the teachings of Jesus, those are at the heart of the Catholic tradition. They're always there calling people back when people get too caught up in some of the other aspects of the tradition, the pomp and circumstance, and all that, which I love too. You always have to keep in perspective.

Brian Lehrer: Lucy in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC Hi, Lucy.

Lucy: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. Yes, I'm Lucy. I'm in Brooklyn. I'm a lifelong Catholic, raised actually in the Catholic Church of the first overhaul of Pope Paul XXIII. I just want to say that I think that Pope Francis, who I was a great fan, actually resisted politics because there was a lot of political pressure on him to go with what, say, a Donald Trump or any of the other right-wing rightward move was pressuring him.

He stood his ground and he addressed things, which interestingly really matter to young people. He addressed the climate. He addressed refugees and his practice of calling Gaza every night from October 9th. That is an example of how you put love into action, how you put yourself present in a human way. I think that that is what young people are responding to. I hope that the next pope will follow in that tradition.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Any thoughts about that call, Professor Rober?

Dr. Rober: Thank you also, Lucy. That was a really insightful set of points about Pope Francis. When you say he resisted politics, yes, he was definitely somebody who set himself against what you might call the rising global right. Certainly, somebody like Trump, he had a very hostile relationship to people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary. He had experience with that kind of thing in Argentina with the military dictatorship there in the late 1970s, the Dirty War, where he saw what that could lead to, what that does to a society.

I do agree that that can be very attractive to people. I think one of the things in the conclave that's going to come up is, certainly, how do the cardinals want to respond to that? Do they want somebody who approached that the way that Francis did? Do they want to make their peace with that, the way you have seen some American bishops and cardinals try to do with the Trump administration, or do they regard other priorities as more important? That's one of the things that's going to come up starting next week.

Brian Lehrer: The caller mentioned Pope Francis in Gaza. I see in The Jerusalem Post on the Israeli side of that, Israel Deletes Pope Condolence Tweet Over Backlash Fear. This says, "Israeli officials have not concealed the reason for this silence. It is directly linked to the Pope's recent statements regarding Israel and the war in Gaza." I guess he inspired different feelings. I don't want to get bogged down in the Middle East in this discussion, but the caller mentioned it. There's been this reporting about Israel and condolences regarding the Pope's death. I guess he was divisive, is that the right word, in terms of that particular conflict?

Dr. Rober: Well, Pope Francis was trying to do something, which is extremely challenging, which is to both carry forward, which he did, the great strides that have been made in Catholic-Jewish dialogue since the 1960s. One of his great friendships from Argentina was with Rabbi Abraham Skorka, a rabbi from Buenos Aires who he wrote a book with, was a good friend of his. We've actually had Rabbi Skorka here at Sacred Heart a couple of times, including dedicating a building named after Pope Francis on campus.

Francis was very dedicated to Catholic-Jewish dialogue. On the other hand, he was dedicated to the humanity of the people of Gaza that he viewed as being under assault, by the way, that the Israeli government has been conducting its war there and was very clear about that. In some ways, that's a no-win situation politically in the sense that it's inevitably going to create backlash. He was standing up for human rights, which the Catholic Church has also stood for, certainly going back very much to Vatican II but with roots earlier.

Brian Lehrer: With Daniel Rober, who's the chair of the Catholic Studies Department at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Chris in Armonk, you're on WNYC. Hello, Chris.

Chris: Hi. I too am a lifelong Catholic. When I think about the Church, when you think of it, it's really a worldwide organization, yet here we are in New York perceiving our perceptions of the Church. In the United States, what we're ready for may not be what it's ready for in the rest of the world. I think the Church is ready for married priests, women priests. Divorced men and women should be able to come back into the Church and become priests.

All of these changes are necessary because we have a dearth of priests in the United States. Whereas in other parts of the world that are less economically advantaged, the priesthood still presents an opportunity. That's a real opportunity for people. That's almost vocation by opportunity. We have that much less in the United States. We need to broaden how we take people into the seminary now in this country. Those are my comments for your guest.

Brian Lehrer: Chris, thank you very much. In fact, we have a text, Professor Rober, from another listener who says, "Jesus appeared to me in a dream last night and told me that He would like a woman to be the next pope. Could a woman be elected pope?" I know the answer to that right now is no, but how do you respond to the sentiment in that text and what Chris said in his phone call?

Dr. Rober: Sure, so Chris makes some very good points. I would point out actually, which really strengthens Chris's point, that while a lot of Catholics in the US are certainly experiencing the fact that there are fewer priests than there used to be, Catholics in the United States are swimming in priests compared to many parts of the world where the Church is actually growing faster than it is here.

One of the things that Francis did during his pontificate was have a synod on the Amazon, a discussion of the Church in the Amazon region of Latin America. One of the discussions there was whether to ordain married men, the so-called viri probati, as priests. That didn't really get anywhere at the time. In the same way, conversations at the Vatican about ordaining women as deacons, there was an academic expert conversation about it that seemed to recommend to move forward with this. Francis did not do anything about it.

There are a couple of items like that that clearly have precedent in church history and seem to be meeting demand both in the Western world but also in parts of the world where there are frankly a lot fewer and far between clergy than there are even here. That's something his successor is going to have to think about, the way of moving forward the tradition on some of these things. I think the question of women in the priesthood is a slightly further off one, but it is certainly a continuation of the same kind of conversation about what is the basis of teachings about the ordained ministry and what does it look like to serve the people of God going forward.

Brian Lehrer: When the caller talks about different contexts for Catholicism in the United States than in parts of the developing world, it brings me back to that New York Post op-ed that I excerpted from at the beginning from a conservative magazine editor. Some of these lines, "Francis was meant to be a pope for the age of globalization. The entire planet would soon be a single community and all that remained to do is reconcile the United States and Europe with the Global South."

"That called for reminding wealthy Americans and Europeans of their duties to the world's poor. If Francis was the pope for a globalist era, what the Catholic Church needs now is a populist pope, one who understands that if the Church renews its ties to the working class within the West, not just in the Global South, it will find ready converts." I have a feeling you're in a different place than that writer, but what do you think as you listen to that?

Dr. Rober: Yes, so that's a really important series of points. I will say that I think using the term "globalization" about Francis could be a little misleading in the sense that Francis would be somebody who would be opposed to the kind of globalization that listeners might be familiar with from somebody like Tom Friedman in The New York Times, which often looks like American culture spreading out to the whole world. That is something that Francis certainly was not in favor of. That he regarded as flattening things, right?

Francis famously described the world as not being a sphere but as being a polyhedron, as having these different points of culture that, in their plurality and diversity, make up the world. I would call that actually a kind of populism. In fact, Francis was often accused of being a populist. The thing that he did that's going to become really relevant is that he really went and chose cardinals from places that were not typically the place where you would get a cardinal from.

For example, in the papal election coming up, there's going to be no cardinal from Los Angeles or Philadelphia or Detroit, places in the United States that, over the last 100 years, have usually had cardinals, whereas he's chosen cardinals from small countries around the world where there's not even necessarily that many Catholics but that he felt should really be represented at the center of the Church and at the highest levels. That very composition of the college of cardinals who are going to elect the next pope has been shaped by Francis to represent not globalization as Westerners think about it but as a church that is spread around the globe and instantiated in these very different ways in different cultural contexts.

Brian Lehrer: What kind of conclave to choose the next pope do you think that's going to make for? One of the NPR reports that I heard on our station the other day was describing the cardinals who the pope elevated in much the same terms that you just did and said the result of that is going to be there are all these cardinals from all over the world who don't know each other. It's going to be a kind of anything-can-happen conclave.

Dr. Rober: What's really important to pay attention to, I'm sure many of your viewers saw the movie Conclave, which, of course, in various ways, made a melodrama out of some of the aspects of a conclave. Most of the kind of stuff that took place in that movie about scrutinizing candidates and everything actually takes place before the conclave starts during what's called the congregations, which is a fancy word for meetings that occur between the cardinals starting basically after the papal funeral, which is on Sunday, where they get to know each other and hash out like, what do they think the priorities for the Church should be for the next pope?

When there's a papal funeral, there's always in the shadow of the funeral because at the funeral, everybody's saying how good the Pope was and everything. Then the question that immediately comes up in the congregations is he was good, but there are some things that the last pope may have been lacking in or that need to be brought forward for the next person.

They're going to spend time getting to know each other, thinking about these issues, and then starting to suss out who among them would be the most appropriate to represent where they think the Church needs to go. If anybody tells you today, they know who the Pope is going to be in two or three weeks, they've got a bridge to sell you because the cardinals don't know that. Some of them have informal lists of people they could see as being plausible, but a lot of it comes out in those conversations. There's a lot of surprises.

Brian Lehrer: Rita in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Rita.

Rita: Oh, hi. Thank you so much. Thank you, Professor and Brian, for this great conversation. I just wanted to say that I have had personal experience of the openness that Francis brought forward, really Vatican II kind of openness. In 2008, I went over as a delegate with a group called FutureChurch to petition for including more women in our Sunday readings, scripture readings. We couldn't really get past the front door of the office. It's called the Dicastery of Divine worship.

In 2024, we went over. We were welcomed at the front door at the office. Then an assistant to the cardinal for that office came and spent 20 minutes with us, looked at our proposal, said he had already heard from his cardinal and another cardinal about our petition because we've been sending letters to everybody. Main focus of it was including the Mary Magdalene proclamation of resurrection. Excuse me. Calm down here.

Brian Lehrer: You're doing all right.

Rita: Anyhow.

Brian Lehrer: You're doing great. You're doing great.

Rita: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Keep going.

Rita: Thank you. One of our major focus points was we wanted to include the reading in Chapter 20 of John's gospel, where Mary Magdalene actually proclaims for the first time, "I have seen the Lord," which is not included on Easter Sunday. That hasn't happened yet. On his last homily, Pope Francis focused on Mary Magdalene. I just got a note from the director of FutureChurch saying, "We both feel like he's talking to us and saying he heard the petition." My two comments are, I do have hope. I hope our next pope will continue this amazing-- He has clearly given the command, Pope Francis did, to listen to the people. That's my hope and dream. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Rita. Professor Rober?

Dr. Rober: Thanks, Rita. That was a great story that really gets at the kind of church that Francis was trying to instantiate, a place where open conversation could be had. Again, to your point, Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, a day when the mass reading is about Mary Magdalene running from the tomb, going to announce the news to the disciples. Really appropriate that you brought that up at that time.

Again, Francis has opened up a series of conversations. Now, the cardinals are going to have to think about if and how they want to continue those conversations. If they want to continue them, do they want to do them in a more systematic way? One of the criticisms of Francis was that he'd be open to people like Rita coming to the Vatican and saying a bunch of things, which are great, but then not a lot of systematic institutional change came out of those on the back end. There are going to be some conversations about, "Do we need somebody who has more institutional know-how to come in and systematize all this so it's not as charismatically-based in the Pope and his own freewheeling approach?"

Brian Lehrer: Well, you talk about open conversation. You wrote in Commonweal about the public rebuke that Vice President JD Vance made against the Pope. You can imagine, we've had, I'll just say, more than one text from listeners who want to say the Pope having to see Vance on Easter Sunday was his final straw. That's what gave him his last stroke or made his heart give out.

You can imagine the comments coming from critics of JD Vance, who only converted to Catholicism in 2019. You know where he is in culture war terms. I guess an atheist might ask, hearing all of this division within Catholics about what the religion should stand for, how can people look to religion for ultimate guidance on anything if such basic questions of morality are so in dispute among believers themselves?

Dr. Rober: That's a great question. That's one that I think if Francis were here, he'd say that that's a great question too. It's something that is best to be honest about, right? One of the reasons Francis wanted Catholics to have these conversations is to be honest with each other and get things out in the open instead of pretending everything is great while having hatred for one another in their hearts because that doesn't really get anywhere, right?

The path to conversion for Francis, not just conversion to religion but conversion to being a better person, is being open to the questions, right? This is something we try to do here at Sacred Heart in the classes I teach. We have students. We have some students who are raised in religious traditions. We have some students who are not, but trying to get them to ask the big questions of, what is the meaning and purpose of life? Where's my life going? Religious traditions have insights on these. They also have counter-insights on these.

They have insights of people who've killed each other over religion, people who hate each other over religion. They open space for having these conversations and finding meaning for oneself and in community. For Francis, that's where it was. It's going out. The Church which goes forth, as he called it, stepping out of the confines of the building, of the narrowness that religiosity can sometimes inculcate to be there with people who are suffering, with people who have needs, both physical needs, also existential needs. Questioning, what is the meaning of my life? Does my life have a meaning? People who despair. That's a place where Francis thought Jesus was and that's where he wanted to be.

Brian Lehrer: Last question. How will they reconcile all this at the conclave? How will they do it? Is it going to be like the equivalent of JD Vance, who attributes a lot of his values to his Catholicism, and AOC, who attributes a lot of her political values to her Catholicism, hashing it out? How will they do this at the conclave?

Dr. Rober: Well, again, there are politics at conclaves, right? There's secular politics. There's church politics. There's personal politics. I've been reading Gerard O Connell's book on the election of Pope Francis, reviewing it in preparation for thinking about this conclave. There were attempts at political interventions in that conclave, which are hilarious in retrospect in terms of-- They always go very badly in terms of how the cardinals take them.

There is a back and forth. There is an assessment of both, does this person fit the moment, but also does this person model discipleship? The cardinals are usually looking for somebody who models personal holiness on some level. Most of the recent popes have come across as having basic individual decency. They had a lot of failings in different ways. Usually, institutional and management levels, but usually projected some level of being somebody who really believed in the gospel and lived it out as best they could in their life.

Again, it's a process of discernment and that's really something. Pope Francis was a Jesuit, a member of the Society of Jesus, the biggest Catholic religious order in the world. One of their hallmarks of being a Jesuit and of the spiritual exercises is discernment. Now, most of the cardinals are not Jesuits. I can basically guarantee you, the next pope will not be a Jesuit, for better or worse. Discernment is really what the cardinals are going to be up to.

They're going to be thinking in prayer, but also using their reason and thinking about the various issues. Who is the best person both to lead, to model, and to teach Catholics around the world? That's a difficult question, but it's one that Catholics believe is influenced by the Holy Spirit, which is God. It's not magic, but that there is guidance going on here, particularly if people take the right approach of prayer and discernment.

Brian Lehrer: Daniel Rober is chair of the Catholic Studies Department at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Dr. Rober, thank you so much.

Dr. Rober: Thank you so much, Brian. Great to be with you.

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